People take care to be polite to the Daily Mail's editor-in-chief, Paul Dacre, because the paper has a famously vindictive nature. Yet that is not a reason to ignore the conflict – inconsistency, some would say – at the heart of the Daily Mail's views on privacy.

Opening the Society of Editors' conference last night in Bristol, Dacre laid into the high court judge, Mr Justice Eady, who has used the Human Rights Act to hand down judgments to stifle the pursuit of scandal by the popular press. "The law is not coming from parliament," said Dacre, "but from arrogant and amoral judgments, words I use very deliberately of one man."

It's not clear whether he is attacking the man or his judgments, but when he says the law does not come from parliament one can only respond with "up to a point, Lord Copper", for Eady is not simply making up the law but is applying Article 8 of the Human Rights Act – the right to respect for private and family life – in an area where it has not been applied before. This incontestably comes from parliament.

But Dacre is right: we do need to have this debate about privacy. There are principles involved that have not been properly aired. Rather than allowing the process to evolve by stealth, parliament needs to decide whether the press is to be muzzled in this way, or not.

The inconsistency of Dacre's approach comes to play in the wider issue of privacy. While he campaigns to expose the private antics of people like Max Mosley, both the Mail and its sister paper the Mail on Sunday do a commendable job in alerting the nation to the dangers of the database state, the enormous threat posed by the government's plans to store data on every mail, phone call and internet connection and the sinister use of terrorist laws by local councils. At the heart of all these measures is the attack on privacy.

It is impossible to argue convincingly for greater protection against official invasion of privacy at the same time as saying newspapers should be allowed to pursue whatever scandal they choose, right into the bedroom if necessary.

What we need are new privacy laws, which to my mind should be entrenched in a Bill of Rights, and which would seek to guarantee privacy from corporations, local and national government, as well all as the press, where that is reasonable and the public interest is not damaged.

A lot of journalists will disagree with that last sentence: no matter. Let us all agree that these compelling issues that Dacre raised are now ripe for debate and legislation, and that he has a good point about the law being elaborated and settled in this ad hoc way by a high court judge.